She said:
"You understand that the management of the whole of the expenditure of the income will be in your hands.
There will be five thousand a year."
She thought that he cared very much about the expenditure of an income of five thousand a year and that the fact that she had done so much for him would rouse in him some affection for her.
But he was thinking exclusively of Maisie Maidan—of Maisie, thousands of miles away from him.
He was seeing the mountains between them—blue mountains and the sea and sunlit plains.
He said:
"That is very generous of you."
And she did not know whether that were praise or a sneer.
That had been a week before.
And all that week he had passed in an increasing agony at the thought that those mountains, that sea, and those sunlit plains would be between him and Maisie Maidan.
That thought shook him in the burning nights: the sweat poured from him and he trembled with cold, in the burning noons—at that thought.
He had no minute's rest; his bowels turned round and round within him: his tongue was perpetually dry and it seemed to him that the breath between his teeth was like air from a pest-house.
He gave no thought to Leonora at all; he had sent in his papers. They were to leave in a month.
It seemed to him to be his duty to leave that place and to go away, to support Leonora.
He did his duty.
It was horrible, in their relationship at that time, that whatever she did caused him to hate her.
He hated her when he found that she proposed to set him up as the Lord of Branshaw again—as a sort of dummy lord, in swaddling clothes.
He imagined that she had done this in order to separate him from Maisie Maidan.
Hatred hung in all the heavy nights and filled the shadowy corners of the room.
So when he heard that she had offered to the Maidan boy to take his wife to Europe with him, automatically he hated her since he hated all that she did.
It seemed to him, at that time, that she could never be other than cruel even if, by accident, an act of hers were kind.... Yes, it was a horrible situation.
But the cool breezes of the ocean seemed to clear up that hatred as if it had been a curtain.
They seemed to give him back admiration for her, and respect.
The agreeableness of having money lavishly at command, the fact that it had bought for him the companionship of Maisie Maidan—these things began to make him see that his wife might have been right in the starving and scraping upon which she had insisted.
He was at ease; he was even radiantly happy when he carried cups of bouillon for Maisie Maidan along the deck.
One night, when he was leaning beside Leonora, over the ship's side, he said suddenly:
"By jove, you're the finest woman in the world.
I wish we could be better friends."
She just turned away without a word and went to her cabin.
Still, she was very much better in health.
And now, I suppose, I must give you Leonora's side of the case....
That is very difficult.
For Leonora, if she preserved an unchanged front, changed very frequently her point of view.
She had been drilled—in her tradition, in her upbringing—to keep her mouth shut.
But there were times, she said, when she was so near yielding to the temptation of speaking that afterwards she shuddered to think of those times.
You must postulate that what she desired above all things was to keep a shut mouth to the world; to Edward and to the women that he loved.
If she spoke she would despise herself.
From the moment of his unfaithfulness with La Dolciquita she never acted the part of wife to Edward.
It was not that she intended to keep herself from him as a principle, for ever.
Her spiritual advisers, I believe, forbade that.
But she stipulated that he must, in some way, perhaps symbolical, come back to her.
She was not very clear as to what she meant; probably she did not know herself.
Or perhaps she did.
There were moments when he seemed to be coming back to her; there were moments when she was within a hair of yielding to her physical passion for him.
In just the same way, at moments, she almost yielded to the temptation to denounce Mrs Basil to her husband or Maisie Maidan to hers.
She desired then to cause the horrors and pains of public scandals.
For, watching Edward more intently and with more straining of ears than that which a cat bestows upon a bird overhead, she was aware of the progress of his passion for each of these ladies.
She was aware of it from the way in which his eyes returned to doors and gateways; she knew from his tranquillities when he had received satisfactions.
At times she imagined herself to see more than was warranted.